GPS disruptions will likely cause some not-so-nice feedback from the FCC and FAA, among other groups.
Perhaps they'll piss off the DOD enough that the military will decide to use a few (appropriately frequency-modified) AGM-88 HARMs to take out the transmitters.;)
In the video this thing never got out of ground effect -- although it did hover high in its ground effect -- so it may be more of a GEM (ground effect machine, aka hovercraft with no skirt) than a helicopter. Still cool, but of more-limited utility.
The mounting system for the motors and props seemed a bit funky. It's not clear what's holding the props onto the shafts, and the motors are bolted to the top of the airframe. Instinctively I'd prefer things the other way around, so that the forces are trying to squeeze it together rather than pull it apart, but if they've done the math and allow plenty of margin, it should be ok. (I figure each prop/motor shaft has got something like 16-20 pounds force pulling on it.)
As far as putting the CG above or below the plane of the rotors, it doesn't matter much -- the rotor plane is well spread out, and you get a gyro effect helping you. The Hiller VZ-1 Pawnee, for example, had the pilot standing above a single ducted fan (actually, two contra-rotating rotors in the single duct). That never got much out of ground effect either.
Apple was never near bankruptcy. Even as their stock was crashing, prior to bringing Jobs back, they had plenty of cash in the bank. The stock was severely undervalued on a strict capitalization basis, because the management was so horrible. (A few more years of that, and they might well have been close to bankruptcy.)
Part of the success of Jobs' turnaround was just him applying his Reality Distortion Field to correct an already distorted reality. Of course, it was Jobs who brought in that management (Sculley) in the first place. It was also under Jobs that Apple had its worst-ever year, when he killed the Mac clones and market penetration of MacOS dropped from 10% to 3% (although that old MacOS was becoming an albatross anyway.)
The flaw there is that (1) photovoltaic cells are actually less efficient at higher temperatures -- an I know how much hotter Texas is than Ontario, and (2) down around Lake Erie you're as far south as (northern) California anyway; a few hundred miles won't make that much difference.
But of course it's just PR, otherwise they'd be better off just adding another reactor to Bruce, Pickering or Darlington.
Other than mass, aren't electrons, muons, and tau particles pretty much identical? Shouldn't their associated neutrinos be, too?
You do realize that it only takes a difference in mass for particles to be tachyonic or non-tachyonic, right? Sure, that difference is by a factor of i, but it's still just the mass.
Actually, the (detected) neutrinos go mostly NW -> SE, and GPS sats being in inclined orbits, go both NW -> SE and SW -> NE, and you need at least three of them to determine a position.
The paper on relativistic effects of moving GPS satellites was a good idea, but not quite as explanatory as it claimed to be.
What most people fail to realize is that pilots in a typical aircraft don't see the ground. The instrument panel is far too big for that. You have to bank the plane or dive more than you normally do in order to see the ground, and then you only see it pretty far away.
Let me guess, you have zero cockpit hours, right? I'm a pilot. If you can't see the ground, your seat isn't adjusted right, or you're in a steep climb (assuming no clouds). Sure, you can't see straight down (well, unless you're flying one of the Aeroflot planes that actually has windows down at foot level), but you can see the ground a couple of miles away (depending on your altitude and attitude), less if you're on descent for landing.
And do you really think the problem should be ignored until it does cause a crash? How about if somebody stands on an overpass and shines a laser at you while you're driving?
Have you ever looked at the sun? It's often blindingly bright.
Indeed it is, although you have to stare at it for a bit to cause permanent damage.
However, if you do the math, you'll find that even a low-powered red laser pointer projects a beam that is as bright as the sun if you look directly at it. Higher-powered lasers, or even same-powered green lasers (the eye being more sensitive to green light than to red) are worse, often much worse.
Even if a laser flash on a pilot doesn't cause eye damage (which it could), it can kill his night vision.
(And, camera flash is a good example -- that lasts milliseconds, but is certainly visible.)
That's pretty much the way C-band satellite (those big old 6+ foot dishes) works.
Yep, convenience of both the smaller dish and dealing with a single provider won out. (And price -- Dish Network or DirectTV packages being quite a bit cheaper than subscribing to all the channels individually -- although it might be cost-effective if you only wanted one or two.)
Get away from the city lights and look up at the night sky. See all those bright pinpoints? Use binocs or a telescope and you'll see even more.
Every one of those pinpoints represents a clear path through space from here to however many light-years away the stars and galaxies are, through which something moving at the speed of light (photons) has travelled without hitting anything. Pretty cool how that works, huh?
In fact, if you look along the plane of the galaxy, you can even tell where the clouds of dust are, because they tend to block the light from the stars behind them. If you're clever (and many astronomers are), you can figure out how thick the dust has to be to block the amount of light that they do.
In fact, space is pretty damn empty. In most directions we can see through millions of light years of it, it's so empty.
Alpha Centauri is a collection of 3 stars... so I am not sure what you mean by "on' them.
Shorthand for "on a planet orbiting one or more of them". And it's not certain that it's actually a trinary, Proxima (Alpha Centauri C) being far enough away that we're not certain that it's gravitationally bound or just happens to be passing nearby.
We don't even know if there are planets there, and it doesn't look too good considering that binary and ternary star systems tend to have extremely unstable orbits.
Depends on the system. In fact both Alpha Centauri A and B could both have stable (for billions of years) planets orbiting in their respective habitable zones, the orbits don't get unstable until a bit further from their respective primaries than that. A and B's closest approach to each other is about Saturn's distance from our Sun, their respective influences on each other's planets (if they have them) is negligible. At certain times of year the other would be a very bright star in the night sky (and other times in the day sky), but that's all.
My question is why you think it's so important that government sent some bureaucrats into space well before it made any financial sense?
The government always does things for reasons which aren't immediately obvious. One of the consequences of the Apollo program was that forced all those companies in all those congressional districts, who had a little piece of the action, to learn how to do high-tech manufacturing. (Read some of the histories, eg, the company manufacturing the batteries for the LM -- primarily a paint company but they happened to have the chemicals necessary -- was doing it in a back room with the assemblers smoking (and cigarette ash falling into the assembly) while they worked. At least, they were up until Grumman paid them a visit and straightened them out. Multiply that by thousands of subsystems.)
Even though a lot of that has since been off-shored, the lessons learned helped boot up the whole personal computer era. Could that have been done more cost-effectively without Apollo? Arguably not, because there wouldn't have been the political capital to do so.
(That said, I think large parts of NASA outlived their usefulness a while back. Other parts still do some good.)
It must be so sad to live with such a limited imagination.
A catapult limited to a mere 10 gees (100 m/sec^2, I'm rounding) would require a track only 28.8 km long to achieve that velocity. That's electric train (maglev) technology, and without air resistance to worry about.
We need not send a man to the moon for this, there's only about a 3.5 second time lag, so if the bulldozer is sufficiently slow speed, it can be run from the ground. Yes, that time lag is going to be a minor problem, but with advances in technology and computer software, it should be liveable in the near future, say, 5 years.
It's easier than that.
The time lag is only 2.5 seconds, and it's easily manageable. The Soviets were teleoperating lunar rovers forty years ago. The (now defunct) Lunar Society was a few amateurs building time-delayed teleoperated robots (R/C truck, TV camera and transmitter, and a 2.5 second delay built into the video and control software) almost twenty-five years ago. We had some ideas for simple improvements to the robot and software (eg artificial horizon, predicted path overlaid on the display) that would have made it even easier. AI has come a long way since then.
Heck, I built a bog-simple delayed-control vehicle for kids to play with at a Space Day event about twenty years ago. Interestingly, adults and little kids learned how to operate it pretty quickly; older kids and teens had a harder time of it, reflexes too tuned to zero-delay R/C and video games. (But we only gave them a few minutes each to play with it, I'm sure they'd have got it eventually.)
That's the problem. It isn't about getting energy WHILE IN space, it's getting materials TO space.
There are plenty of materials in space.
Look up.
See that other bright thing in the sky?
It's called 'The Moon'.
It consists largely of what we breathe and what solar cells are made of: oxygen and silicon. There's also a fsckload of aluminum, titanium, rare earth elements, and undoubtedly meteoritic iron, nickel, and other heavy metals. There's even a bit of water, although there's plenty more of that a little further out.
Oh, and getting materials off of the Moon? Electromagnetic catapult powered by solar energy will work just fine, thanks. No atmosphere to get in the way.
You don't have to get the people up into space, beyond a relative few to set things up. You can bring the goods, materials, and energy to them here on Earth -- it's downhill.
and planning out transcontinental electric rail lines. Being done along east and west coast corridors, problematic across large stretches of the west where the electrical infrastructure may be inadequate.
Of course, given the slow rate of progress implied by some of the above dates, we may still not be able to move from hydrocarbons in less than fifty years -- although things can change fast if there are sustained price rises (rather than the current era of geopolitically driven artificial price hikes and drops).
I'll give you that it helps to be good at self-publishing, but that really isn't all that difficult. Most people capable of writing a readable novel are capable of learning how to self-publish. And it's getting easier all the time -- wouldn't surprise me if a year or two from now MS Word and Open/Libre Office have options to "export as e-book". (Yeah, there's still covers and such -- and a growing sub-industry among artists who do covers.)
The only real question is whether the volume of a lower price point will outweigh the enhanced marketing of a publisher. I think your three examples answer that question.
My original three examples were merely an existence proof that trad publishers do sometimes pick up self-published authors. I can easily counter your point with plenty of other authors who have gone from traditional publishing to indie publishing: JA Konrath is perhaps widest known and has shared his royalty numbers, but Barry Eisler turned down a $500,000 advance from a NY publisher and self-pubbed. Most authors who've moved (at least partly) from traditional to indie are reporting much better royalties -- not surprising when you consider the difference between 70% of the price of an e-book vs 10% of a hardcover or 8% of a paperback.
What it comes down to is that publishers don't do near as much marketing as they used to (oh, they'll focus on one or two authors), nor do they pay as much up front. Advances are down across the board, and publishers are making absurd e-rights grabs that authors are starting to walk away from. It can be done to go with both traditional and self publishing -- plenty of authors are doing that -- but if you fail on your own the odds are that you would never have succeeded with the big guys, because the big guys rarely give any more support to a newbie than that newbie could do on his or her own. The way things are going, in fact, is we're more likely to see traditional publishers cherry-picking the successful indies. Why waste time and money on unknowns plucked out of the slush when you can buy into a sure thing?
A solution would be to make the first chapter free and the full book $5.
Which is why most sites -- Amazon, Smashwords, B&N -- do offer free sample downloads (typically 10-20%, publisher can override). They also offer refunds.
The sweet spot for ebooks may be changing. I've been charging $2.99 for novels because I've been making a lot of money. But I may be doing myself a disservice and leaving some money on the table. The goal is to find that perfect point that balances sales and profits. That means experimenting. In the past, I've been against charging more, because my own experiments showed it didn't work. But I've now seen other authors who it is working for, and that encourages me to experiment some more.
Also, and this is a bit off topic but it should be said: anyone serious about making money off their work should probably stay away from self-publishing. Not only do you have all the disadvantages talked about above, but if you self-published the big publishing houses will not touch you.
This advice is a few years out of date. Just ask Amanda Hocking. Or Larry Correia. Or John Scalzi. You just have to be good.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, Netcraft confirms it.
Oh wait, that's BSD...
Heck, something to mount those tires on would be kinda nice, too. And somewhere to sit.
GPS disruptions will likely cause some not-so-nice feedback from the FCC and FAA, among other groups.
Perhaps they'll piss off the DOD enough that the military will decide to use a few (appropriately frequency-modified) AGM-88 HARMs to take out the transmitters. ;)
..appropriate FCC authorization and permits to run a bogus cell tower?
In the video this thing never got out of ground effect -- although it did hover high in its ground effect -- so it may be more of a GEM (ground effect machine, aka hovercraft with no skirt) than a helicopter. Still cool, but of more-limited utility.
The mounting system for the motors and props seemed a bit funky. It's not clear what's holding the props onto the shafts, and the motors are bolted to the top of the airframe. Instinctively I'd prefer things the other way around, so that the forces are trying to squeeze it together rather than pull it apart, but if they've done the math and allow plenty of margin, it should be ok. (I figure each prop/motor shaft has got something like 16-20 pounds force pulling on it.)
As far as putting the CG above or below the plane of the rotors, it doesn't matter much -- the rotor plane is well spread out, and you get a gyro effect helping you. The Hiller VZ-1 Pawnee, for example, had the pilot standing above a single ducted fan (actually, two contra-rotating rotors in the single duct). That never got much out of ground effect either.
Apple was never near bankruptcy. Even as their stock was crashing, prior to bringing Jobs back, they had plenty of cash in the bank. The stock was severely undervalued on a strict capitalization basis, because the management was so horrible. (A few more years of that, and they might well have been close to bankruptcy.)
Part of the success of Jobs' turnaround was just him applying his Reality Distortion Field to correct an already distorted reality. Of course, it was Jobs who brought in that management (Sculley) in the first place. It was also under Jobs that Apple had its worst-ever year, when he killed the Mac clones and market penetration of MacOS dropped from 10% to 3% (although that old MacOS was becoming an albatross anyway.)
The flaw there is that (1) photovoltaic cells are actually less efficient at higher temperatures -- an I know how much hotter Texas is than Ontario, and (2) down around Lake Erie you're as far south as (northern) California anyway; a few hundred miles won't make that much difference.
But of course it's just PR, otherwise they'd be better off just adding another reactor to Bruce, Pickering or Darlington.
Other than mass, aren't electrons, muons, and tau particles pretty much identical? Shouldn't their associated neutrinos be, too?
You do realize that it only takes a difference in mass for particles to be tachyonic or non-tachyonic, right? Sure, that difference is by a factor of i, but it's still just the mass.
Actually, the (detected) neutrinos go mostly NW -> SE, and GPS sats being in inclined orbits, go both NW -> SE and SW -> NE, and you need at least three of them to determine a position.
The paper on relativistic effects of moving GPS satellites was a good idea, but not quite as explanatory as it claimed to be.
What most people fail to realize is that pilots in a typical aircraft don't see the ground. The instrument panel is far too big for that. You have to bank the plane or dive more than you normally do in order to see the ground, and then you only see it pretty far away.
Let me guess, you have zero cockpit hours, right? I'm a pilot. If you can't see the ground, your seat isn't adjusted right, or you're in a steep climb (assuming no clouds). Sure, you can't see straight down (well, unless you're flying one of the Aeroflot planes that actually has windows down at foot level), but you can see the ground a couple of miles away (depending on your altitude and attitude), less if you're on descent for landing.
And do you really think the problem should be ignored until it does cause a crash? How about if somebody stands on an overpass and shines a laser at you while you're driving?
Have you ever looked at the sun? It's often blindingly bright.
Indeed it is, although you have to stare at it for a bit to cause permanent damage.
However, if you do the math, you'll find that even a low-powered red laser pointer projects a beam that is as bright as the sun if you look directly at it. Higher-powered lasers, or even same-powered green lasers (the eye being more sensitive to green light than to red) are worse, often much worse.
Even if a laser flash on a pilot doesn't cause eye damage (which it could), it can kill his night vision.
(And, camera flash is a good example -- that lasts milliseconds, but is certainly visible.)
I think APL has the edge there. It went so far as to make up its own non-ASCII symbol set.
Fortran (at least, IV and earlier) totally ignored white space, even in the middle of an identifier. Of course, this led to problems like
DO 10 I = 1.10
meaning "assign the floating point number 1.10 to variable DO10I", when the programmer meant to type
DO 10 I = 1,10
meaning "loop from here to label 10 varying I from 1 to 10".
An error something like this caused the Mariner II probe to Venus to go off course at launch and the Range Safety Officer hit the destruct.
That's pretty much the way C-band satellite (those big old 6+ foot dishes) works.
Yep, convenience of both the smaller dish and dealing with a single provider won out. (And price -- Dish Network or DirectTV packages being quite a bit cheaper than subscribing to all the channels individually -- although it might be cost-effective if you only wanted one or two.)
Get away from the city lights and look up at the night sky. See all those bright pinpoints? Use binocs or a telescope and you'll see even more.
Every one of those pinpoints represents a clear path through space from here to however many light-years away the stars and galaxies are, through which something moving at the speed of light (photons) has travelled without hitting anything. Pretty cool how that works, huh?
In fact, if you look along the plane of the galaxy, you can even tell where the clouds of dust are, because they tend to block the light from the stars behind them. If you're clever (and many astronomers are), you can figure out how thick the dust has to be to block the amount of light that they do.
In fact, space is pretty damn empty. In most directions we can see through millions of light years of it, it's so empty.
Alpha Centauri is a collection of 3 stars ... so I am not sure what you mean by "on' them.
Shorthand for "on a planet orbiting one or more of them". And it's not certain that it's actually a trinary, Proxima (Alpha Centauri C) being far enough away that we're not certain that it's gravitationally bound or just happens to be passing nearby.
We don't even know if there are planets there, and it doesn't look too good considering that binary and ternary star systems tend to have extremely unstable orbits.
Depends on the system. In fact both Alpha Centauri A and B could both have stable (for billions of years) planets orbiting in their respective habitable zones, the orbits don't get unstable until a bit further from their respective primaries than that. A and B's closest approach to each other is about Saturn's distance from our Sun, their respective influences on each other's planets (if they have them) is negligible. At certain times of year the other would be a very bright star in the night sky (and other times in the day sky), but that's all.
My question is why you think it's so important that government sent some bureaucrats into space well before it made any financial sense?
The government always does things for reasons which aren't immediately obvious. One of the consequences of the Apollo program was that forced all those companies in all those congressional districts, who had a little piece of the action, to learn how to do high-tech manufacturing. (Read some of the histories, eg, the company manufacturing the batteries for the LM -- primarily a paint company but they happened to have the chemicals necessary -- was doing it in a back room with the assemblers smoking (and cigarette ash falling into the assembly) while they worked. At least, they were up until Grumman paid them a visit and straightened them out. Multiply that by thousands of subsystems.)
Even though a lot of that has since been off-shored, the lessons learned helped boot up the whole personal computer era. Could that have been done more cost-effectively without Apollo? Arguably not, because there wouldn't have been the political capital to do so.
(That said, I think large parts of NASA outlived their usefulness a while back. Other parts still do some good.)
It must be so sad to live with such a limited imagination.
A catapult limited to a mere 10 gees (100 m/sec^2, I'm rounding) would require a track only 28.8 km long to achieve that velocity. That's electric train (maglev) technology, and without air resistance to worry about.
We need not send a man to the moon for this, there's only about a 3.5 second time lag, so if the bulldozer is sufficiently slow speed, it can be run from the ground. Yes, that time lag is going to be a minor problem, but with advances in technology and computer software, it should be liveable in the near future, say, 5 years.
It's easier than that.
The time lag is only 2.5 seconds, and it's easily manageable. The Soviets were teleoperating lunar rovers forty years ago. The (now defunct) Lunar Society was a few amateurs building time-delayed teleoperated robots (R/C truck, TV camera and transmitter, and a 2.5 second delay built into the video and control software) almost twenty-five years ago. We had some ideas for simple improvements to the robot and software (eg artificial horizon, predicted path overlaid on the display) that would have made it even easier. AI has come a long way since then.
Heck, I built a bog-simple delayed-control vehicle for kids to play with at a Space Day event about twenty years ago. Interestingly, adults and little kids learned how to operate it pretty quickly; older kids and teens had a harder time of it, reflexes too tuned to zero-delay R/C and video games. (But we only gave them a few minutes each to play with it, I'm sure they'd have got it eventually.)
The rest of your post is bang on.
That's the problem. It isn't about getting energy WHILE IN space, it's getting materials TO space.
There are plenty of materials in space.
Look up.
See that other bright thing in the sky?
It's called 'The Moon'.
It consists largely of what we breathe and what solar cells are made of: oxygen and silicon. There's also a fsckload of aluminum, titanium, rare earth elements, and undoubtedly meteoritic iron, nickel, and other heavy metals. There's even a bit of water, although there's plenty more of that a little further out.
Oh, and getting materials off of the Moon? Electromagnetic catapult powered by solar energy will work just fine, thanks. No atmosphere to get in the way.
You don't have to get the people up into space, beyond a relative few to set things up. You can bring the goods, materials, and energy to them here on Earth -- it's downhill.
unless someone is already designing airplanes that run on liquid hydrogen,
Over thirty years ago: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0360319979900211
prototyping nuclear powered cargo ships,
Over fifty years ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS_Savannah
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civilian_nuclear_ships
and planning out transcontinental electric rail lines.
Being done along east and west coast corridors, problematic across large stretches of the west where the electrical infrastructure may be inadequate.
Of course, given the slow rate of progress implied by some of the above dates, we may still not be able to move from hydrocarbons in less than fifty years -- although things can change fast if there are sustained price rises (rather than the current era of geopolitically driven artificial price hikes and drops).
I'll give you that it helps to be good at self-publishing, but that really isn't all that difficult. Most people capable of writing a readable novel are capable of learning how to self-publish. And it's getting easier all the time -- wouldn't surprise me if a year or two from now MS Word and Open/Libre Office have options to "export as e-book". (Yeah, there's still covers and such -- and a growing sub-industry among artists who do covers.)
The only real question is whether the volume of a lower price point will outweigh the enhanced marketing of a publisher. I think your three examples answer that question.
My original three examples were merely an existence proof that trad publishers do sometimes pick up self-published authors. I can easily counter your point with plenty of other authors who have gone from traditional publishing to indie publishing: JA Konrath is perhaps widest known and has shared his royalty numbers, but Barry Eisler turned down a $500,000 advance from a NY publisher and self-pubbed. Most authors who've moved (at least partly) from traditional to indie are reporting much better royalties -- not surprising when you consider the difference between 70% of the price of an e-book vs 10% of a hardcover or 8% of a paperback.
What it comes down to is that publishers don't do near as much marketing as they used to (oh, they'll focus on one or two authors), nor do they pay as much up front. Advances are down across the board, and publishers are making absurd e-rights grabs that authors are starting to walk away from. It can be done to go with both traditional and self publishing -- plenty of authors are doing that -- but if you fail on your own the odds are that you would never have succeeded with the big guys, because the big guys rarely give any more support to a newbie than that newbie could do on his or her own. The way things are going, in fact, is we're more likely to see traditional publishers cherry-picking the successful indies. Why waste time and money on unknowns plucked out of the slush when you can buy into a sure thing?
A solution would be to make the first chapter free and the full book $5.
Which is why most sites -- Amazon, Smashwords, B&N -- do offer free sample downloads (typically 10-20%, publisher can override). They also offer refunds.
J A Konrath defends the 99c price point,
Not any more. From his October 4 blog post:
The sweet spot for ebooks may be changing. I've been charging $2.99 for novels because I've been making a lot of money. But I may be doing myself a disservice and leaving some money on the table. The goal is to find that perfect point that balances sales and profits. That means experimenting. In the past, I've been against charging more, because my own experiments showed it didn't work. But I've now seen other authors who it is working for, and that encourages me to experiment some more.
Also, and this is a bit off topic but it should be said: anyone serious about making money off their work should probably stay away from self-publishing. Not only do you have all the disadvantages talked about above, but if you self-published the big publishing houses will not touch you.
This advice is a few years out of date. Just ask Amanda Hocking. Or Larry Correia. Or John Scalzi. You just have to be good.